The Discursive Construction of Urban Consumption Spaces: An Analysis Based on AI Hallucinations
Received date: 2025-10-07
Revised date: 2025-11-22
Online published: 2025-12-28
In the era of Artificial Intelligence (AI), Large Language Models (LLMs) have become important informational mediators through which the public perceives urban spaces, and AI discourse has emerged as a powerful force in the construction of urban spaces. Using Guangzhou as a case study, we categorized urban consumption spaces into four types: shopping spaces, catering and entertainment spaces, tourism and leisure spaces, and residential and commercial housing. We constructed an evaluation question set for hallucinations in urban consumption spaces within a discourse-power framework and used hallucination tests to examine the commonalities and differences between Chinese and international AI models, namely, DeepSeek and ChatGPT, in the production of spatial discourse, thereby explaining how AI hallucination discourse constructs urban consumption spaces. The main findings of this study are as follows. (1) In the hallucination tests of urban consumption spaces, ChatGPT exhibited lower hallucination rates than DeepSeek at both the overall level and across individual categories. Residential and commercial housing emerged as high-incidence domains of hallucinations for both AI models, whereas the most pronounced divergence in hallucination rates between the two models occurred in tourism and leisure spaces. The primary sources of AI-generated content, in descending order, were news media, individual or commercial institutions, government agencies, and online encyclopedias. Both models tend to respond to mainstream spatial discourses, demonstrating a limited capacity for revealing the complex, diverse, and contradictory realities of the city. Specifically, ChatGPT favors generalized frameworks in its depiction of urban consumption spaces, whereas DeepSeek's spatial narratives display a planning-oriented logic aligned with urban development strategies. (2) By integrating and reproducing specific discourses originating from governments, news media, and commercial institutions, AI discourse operates as a novel power subject that constructs multiple "realities" and promotes the production of meanings attached to consumption centers, symbolization of architectural landscapes, and technologization of consumption spaces and also adjudicates spatial value, allowing its power to operate in a "rational" manner. (3) The AI hallucination discourse constructs space by producing subject positions tailored to users, such as "supporters of urban development," "experience-oriented consumers," "beneficiaries of technological progress," and "astute investors." As users identify with and accept these positions, they enact specific consumption-space practices grounded in particular forms of knowledge, generating new data that are subsequently mobilized to reproduce the same discursive system. In this process, a specific knowledge regime is sustained, and power continues to operate. From a discourse-power perspective, this study elucidates the pathways through which urban consumption spaces are constructed by AI in the era of artificial intelligence. Although, it advances our understanding of the modes and impacts of urban knowledge circulation amid the rise of generative AI, critical reflection on the discursive and power relations embedded in technological products contributes to ethical scrutiny of smart city practices.
Yuxiang Li , Yuming Luo , Geng Lin . The Discursive Construction of Urban Consumption Spaces: An Analysis Based on AI Hallucinations[J]. Tropical Geography, 2026 , 46(1) : 140 -153 . DOI: 10.13284/j.cnki.rddl.20250684
表1 城市实体消费空间分类体系Table 1 Classification system of urban physical consumption spaces |
| 城市实体消费空间类型 | 定义与特征 | 具体场所示例 |
|---|---|---|
| 购物空间 | 以商品交易为核心功能的实体空间。其形态从传统的市场演变为现代高度 景观化、体验化的场所。 | 百货商店、购物中心、品牌旗舰店、商业街与步行街、奥特莱斯等 |
| 餐饮与娱乐空间 | 以提供餐饮服务、休闲娱乐和社交体验为核心功能的消费场所。其价值 不仅在于商品本身,更在于其营造的氛围、社交属性和文化符号。 | 餐厅、奶茶店、健身房、书店、 咖啡馆、酒吧、电影院等 |
| 旅游与休闲空间 | 将自然景观、文化遗产、城市风貌或特定节庆活动转化为消费对象的空间。 | 自然景观地、历史文化街区、网红 打卡地、文创艺术区、城市公园等 |
| 住宅与商品房 | 房地产不仅是消费的对象,也是阶层的象征。消费配套成为提升房地产价值、售卖生活方式的核心策略。 | 商品住宅小区、服务式公寓与高端 公寓、旅游房地产、青年社区等 |
1 例如,设问:广州市政府规划的国际消费中心城市核心承载区包括“五大世界级地标商圈”,请完整列出这5个商圈的名称。并选择“广州塔—琶洲”商圈,阐述其功能与未来重点发展的产业方向。第一个问题有可被验证的事实核心,若AI遗漏、添加或错位某个商圈,即可判定为幻觉。即使答对第一个问题,在后续的引导性设问中,AI对商圈“功能”“特色”的描述是否准确?是严格复述官方话语,还是开始臆想编造,这成为可用于话语分析的重点。
2 在测试过程中,对AI在每个回答提供的引用来源网站均进行逐一人工核查,以确保引用网站来源类型的真实性。
3 剔除了“广州”与“广州市”2个与消费空间感知无关的高频词。
黎宇翔:选题,实验设计与操作,框架构建,图表绘制,论文写作与修改;
罗宇明:选题与框架构建细化,实验操作;
林 耿:理论与写作思路指导,论文修改,基金支持。
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